Norman Kitz

Norman Kitz , actually Norbert Kitz, was a British designer of calculating machines . He built the first electronic table calculator Sumlock Anita (1961).

Kitz studied at Birkbeck College at the University of London with Andrew D. Booth (1918–2009), who had ideas for electronic desktop calculators as early as the late 1940s. Kitz built such a computer (Simple Electronic Computer, SEC) according to Booth's ideas at the end of the 1940s as the subject of his master's thesis as an electrical engineer. He received his diploma in 1951 with the thesis A discussion of automatic digital high speed calculating machines with special reference to SEC- a Simple Electronic Computer . He then worked for English Electric at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington on Alan Turing's pilot ACE project , the commercial version of which was the DEUCE (1955) from English Electric.

Anita Mark VIII

Then he went to Bell Punch, a manufacturer of mechanical devices - they got their name from a validation machine for trains and buses that rang after validation. They also made mechanical computing devices. In 1956, Kitz proposed the manufacture of electronic devices to directors and led the development of the first fully electronic commercially available desktop calculator, the Sumlock Anita, the prototype of which was presented in 1958 and which was presented to the public in October 1961 (at trade fairs in England and Hamburg). The computers used vacuum tubes (including decatrons , cold cathode tubes ) and Nixie tubes for the display . They used decimal arithmetic internally instead of digital. 10,000 copies had been sold by 1964.

Computers under the name Anita were produced until the 1970s, but with transistors and later integrated circuits since the 1960s. In 1966 they were a company under their own name (Sumlock Anita), which was bought by Rockwell International in 1973, which ceased production in 1976.

Web links

• Roger G. Johnson Andrew D. Booth. Britain´s other fourth man , pdf , with photo of Kitz
• To Anita

Individual evidence

1. ↑ For A new inspiration to arithmetic or accounting. Sumlock was the comptometer of Bell Punch. There were two versions, Mark VII and VIII, of which only the Mark VIII was built.